evolution creations

I think you know that your a World of Warcraft addict when you are trolling the internet and find something like this. Garfield + WoW = awesomeness ftw. Although John Arbuckle probably would be wielding the Sword of a Thousand Truths worse than most.

I do have to admit, having missed the releases of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, actually experiencing an expansion such as Cataclysm will be a whole new experience. Everything is going to change–everything. And I can’t wait.

In what has to be one of the most disheartening decisions by the Obama administration I’ve seen in recent months, the announcement came today that NASA is making plans to end Project Constellation and post-pone efforts to send people back to the moon and arguably beyond.

What has become of the National Space and Aeronautics Agency? Huge budgets to plan for trips to the stars have plagued their ability to get and secure funding to plan for the on-going journey into the stars. Is the direction of the Administration to privatize this function to outside vendors in favor of carrying this out within internal government agencies? Would we see similar types of mis-spending and questionable practices as we saw out of Blackwater and Halliburton in Iraq and Afghan?

There is one point to this article that I can’t argue with–in the 40+ years since we have put a man on the moon, the agency has failed to progress the innovation and technology necessary to put a humans further into space. While rocket development has come a long way, the sheer scale and depth of a project necessary to go to Mars is currently so astronomical (no pun intended) that it just doesn’t seem feasible with today’s technology.

While the need still exists to provide funding for research and development into area’s of off-planet exploration, guidelines and expectations still need to be set in order to ensure that those monies are going to worthwhile causes and not into some skunkworks project that will only marginally improve the current rocketry and propulsion understanding. I’m not advocating

that our goal should be warp drives and sub-light engines, but clearly we need to have a new approach to how we:

1. Get humans into space, so overcoming the forces of gravity that will allow us to carry heavy payloads into orbit,
2. Cover off the massive distance between Earth and Mars (at it’s closest distance Mars is about 36 million miles and at it’s furthest is over 250 million miles)

By decreasing the total time in space to cover the distance between Earth and Mars we will have to carry considerably less fuel, supplies, and equipment than if we had to cover that distance off using conventional rocketry. Subsequently if we had a way to send all the necessary supplies and fuel into space and construct the ship while in order, the shape and construction of the vehicle would be considerably different as there would not be a need to withstand the tremendous forces (near to 9 thousand degrees on re-entry) that current space vehicles are required to be constructed to meet. If you look at the lunar module, because it was only designed to operate in space or low atmosphere conditions, the construction of the lunar module to the command module on the Saturn V rockets were considerably different.

What we need in NASA is some visions of the future, what is it that we want to accomplish and how do we need to improve our current understandings in order to get there? Or is the end goal so impossible that we should alter our course now and save ourselves the headaches and hassle of even trying to put that square peg (travel to another planet) into the round hole (the financial burdens required to invest in such a trip). Also even if we were to expend a vast amount of financial resources towards this type or project, would we be able to rinse and repeat that activity in a way that makes going to Mars worthwhile or is this a one shot trip? We do it once to say that we can or did, but the feasibility of going back makes this not practical?

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

In these ever lasting words that Patrick Stewart says during the theme to Star Trek: The Next Generation, we find ourselves in similar shoes as we continue to embark on our joy into space and beyond.

Recently I started to watch the series When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions and I have to admit, the progress that we’ve made and the steps that we have taken have been nothing short of a miracle. How we started a little less than half a century ago with a dream to go into space and the Moon, to today where we are sending probes into deep space, cataloging distant worlds and testing the limits of our engineering and imagination with new methods of survival and exploration to planets such as Mars within our own solar system.

When we look at today’s generation and our perspective on space, I don’t think that we see the same type of hands on drive that we saw in previous generations. Previous generations were more inclined to try something in the real world and observe and adjust; whereas in today’s generation the safer route is to computer model the simulation and extrapolate possible outcomes or the likely outcome. There’s something lost there that I think has degraded our overall experience when it comes to space travel and exploration.

The reasons why we leave earth I don’t think have changed. Humans by their very nature are curious beings, and while we certainly don’t pretend to know everything about our physical world, the magical pull that is inside each and every one of us to look up at the stars and wonder, Are we alone in this universe?, and if not, who and where are others that are like us?

If the Drake equation is even remotely accurate, the likelihood of life in the universe is not just probable but a certainty. Stephen Hawking’s recently commented that he has concerns on how encounters with extraterrestrial life would go and that almost certainly the Earth would become a victim–similar to how we have fantasized it happening in such movies as War of the Worlds. While our initial attempts at communicating with extraterrestrials have promoted peace and openness, it begs the question whether or not we are being naive in assuming that creatures from beyond the stars are peaceful and curious and eager to learn as we are. And in fact if we take our own human behavior into account, we are savage creatures who wage war on each other, plan the destruction of the human race through weapons of mass destruction, and are otherwise suspicious of each others actions and motives. Why should we assume that while the best parts of humanity should be what we present as our good foot forward, that other species of life out there in the universe will be any more noble and without the deeper seeded maliciousness that exists in each and every one of us today?

The big news today was the Hayabusa’s return to earth after its mission to collect samples from the asteroid: Itokawa and provide us with a clearer picture of the primordial stuff that makes up our universe and what elements and compositions of materials exist elsewhere in our universe. Clearly humans are still moving forward with our desire to go beyond the stars, but I question whether or not we are making enough dramatic steps forward as our forefathers had done to pave the path into space many decades ago.

It is up to the future generations to continue the progress and the determination to go beyond our atmosphere and to be curious about the universe as a whole. Even intellectually we have become so mathematical and theoretical that we are borderline on the philosophical instead of anything that remotely appears to be applied physics. The hows and whys of the natural world are becoming more and more unclear and in many ways seem to be hindering our ability to develop the new technology and methods that are needed to aid in our journey to the stars. Our limits in terms of our understanding of the universe prevent us from conceiving of speed in terms faster than light. We use the term impossible with such certainty, and yet even if we look at our past and the things we would assert similar certainty on, it would seem that certainty is no longer certain but rather just a temporary hold on our understanding waiting to be unlocked by that breakthrough that changes or transforms our understanding. Centuries ago everyone was certain that the world was flat (baring the current argument amongst the current Flat Earth Society folks) and yet our understanding changed and we now (for the most part) can agree that the earth is spherical. Centuries ago, the idea of a person flying seemed so completely far from the realm of possibilities that such talk would make others look on you with confusion and contempt. How dare you think that humans can fly! And yet today flight is as common place and walking and all it took was a principle on lift and technology to take advantage of it. Today the idea of space travel where the distance between two points is covered in a very short period of time seems to be an impossible feat. Theories such as the Theory of Relativity that deals with the amount of energy it would take to go the speed of light and other Constants further plague our abilities to take the next leap forward from the speed of a rocket to the speed of a photon. We’ve assumed that there is nothing faster in this universe than light, and perhaps with today’s level of understanding and technology that is true, but just as it was thought to be impossible to go faster than the speed of sound, human courage and our desire to go beyond slowly pushed through that barrier and now we see that as a non-issue. Will faster than light travel be done in the same way?

As I’m sure is the case with the majority of folks out there, I hope that within my lifetime I can see the day when humanity embarks on a truly remarkable journey into the stars and we can experience the universe in a way that we could only have dreamed about. What new things lie out there for us to find and discover? What new challenges and species will we meet? How will our experiences forever change the world that we live in today–the one we call Earth and Home? While there are many questions that leave more questions than answers, there is one thing that remains a certainty–we will never stop looking up at the stars and wondering what is up there.

When we think of the web, today the web is synonymous with search engines–in particular the three that top the list are Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. But in most people’s minds, there is really only one that is the Windex of the search world, and that’s Google.

I remember back when I was in high school, how we used search engines like DogPile, as these types of search engines would aggregate multiple different search engines results together. The rational for doing that was back then, it was a much different landscape in terms of searching the web and no one provider seemed to do it well. You would have Webcrawler and Yahoo! and others, but their results seemed to vary and one search would yield a variable cornucopia of “stuff”, maybe stuff we intended to find, and maybe stuff that seems so far off the beaten path you wonder to yourself, “How in the world is that relevant?”. Then along came Google and the game changed.

I remember many years ago a good friend of mine saying, “Hey have you tried Google?”. My first thought was, “No, it’s just another search engine”. But low and behold that turned out to be the understatement of the century, as Google as grown to be the household name when it comes to searching. Additionally it has become one of the de facto information providers for companies to do research–especially when it comes to programming errors, server errors, errors that appear in logs, etc. Most techies are accustom now to doing a Google search on the issue to see if the community has experienced the problem. So ingrained has Google become in the world of troubleshooting a problem, LifeHacker’s recent survey on Best Computer Diagnostics, has Google listed as the number one tool, beating out several top rated contenders. Clearly Google has changed the way that we look at the web.

Today Google announced that they are evolving once again. This is on the heals of Apple announcing that the iPhone4 and iOS4 have “This changes everything. Again“. Google announces that they have added Caffeine to their indexing services takes them closer and closer to real-time indexing 0f web content. How does this change things?

I remember the days managing tech support for a top Web Hosting company, and almost daily you’d see the question asked by a customer “I have submitted my site to Google to be indexed, but why is it not appearing on the search?”. Many today would say, “Well maybe you should pay for it through AdSense like everyone else”, but fundamentally this shouldn’t be true. Web searches should allow a user to search the web and find not just the glitzy gimmicky results that companies and merchants want you to see, but also stuff that is related to your topic but provided by lesser known sources. That’s the beauty of the web, no longer is content pushed out to the users by the people who have the most resources, best logistics, or publishing power, but that anyone can publish something to the web and that information can be consumed by an indexing service and served out at a later time when someone enters a string that has relevance. So back to the question that was posed above, what happened?

Back then, Google reindexing services did take several days if not weeks to index your site. Additionally users would have to make sure that their sites were Search Engine Optimized (SEO) to ensure that they had the best chance of the indexer picking up the right content and matching it to relevant search strings. But even if a site was SEO optimized, the indexing process was still slow. I recall many instances where we would have to look through access logs and such to verify to a customer that “Yes your site was indexed, look the Google crawler was accessing your content”. This was a very frustrating thing for site owners who did not have the capital to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on professional SEO services and/or AdWords/AdSense to improve their rankings.

How does Caffine change all of this? Well this is best explained on the Google Blog for the technical minded folks, but for everyone else, what Google has done is to take the chore of indexing the web from indexing large chunks of information that was tedious and time consuming, to much smaller and more frequent chunks of information to enable them to refresh content that would otherwise take much longer to be indexed. Just how much information are we talking about? Generally speaking each webpage (omitting all the funky addons such as Flash, movies, publication grade images), the webpages themselves are only several KB each. From what Google is saying, Caffeine has the ability to index hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of data a day! Assuming that each webpage is about 5KB in size, this is about 20,971,520,000 individual webpages a day! Pfew! Needless to say that’s a lot.

Given the size of their databases needed to store all this information and the size of their server farms, it does beg the question, where’s the upper limit here? How much of the web can Google store because at some point in time, the web will live in the Google cloud. How are other search providers going to compete with this level of near real-time indexing? And when looking between the lines, is this a way for Google to improve their ability to news aggregate and read in other news sources to provide more timely real-time propagation of breaking news as it’s happening?

When we thought the glass ceiling was hit, Google took the ten-ton hammer and smashed it to bits. Now by raising the bar, I wonder who has the ability to beat Google or is this just the beginning of an empire destine to rule the web for the next several decades?

There is no doubt in any American’s mind that we are a litigious country. We love our laws and go to great lengths to protect those laws–either through military conflicts such as the Iraq and Afghan wars–but closer to home, we have become a society that sees using the legal system to not only resolve issues, but to profit from those rulings.

When were the days when we were just satisfied to have a win in our favor and reasonable damages awarded for the harm inflicted?

I look at one case in particular, as Judge Kimba Wood has recently ruled that peer-to-peer file sharing service LimeWire infringes copyright. Now this in itself is certainly reprehensible; however, what makes this situation move from the legal to unethical is what Attorney Kelly Klaus is seeking in terms of damages–1.5 Trillion dollars. Yes folks, that’s 1,500,000,000,000.00 dollars in damages at a cost of $750 per download.

Let’s just take a look at the math. Last I checked, you could download a song for about .99 cents, or an album for between $14.99-$24.99. Movies generally range from $9.99 to $39.99 for your high end Blu-Ray disks. Movie or Television series run anywhere from $49.99 to several hundred dollars. But certainly each download could not have been several hundred dollars, let alone $750! If someone downloads 1 song, shouldn’t that one download only be worth .99 cents plus a certain percentage for additional costs and an additional penalty fee for the infringement? That one song, I can’t see being worth more than a few dollars when everything is said and done–at the most.

And yet the RIAA continues to seek ridiculous settlements and damages to compensate for a soft economy. Is it the fact that people are downloading more that causes their bottom lines to become leaner and leaner? Or is it because the music, films, and TV being produced has become less and less quality and people just don’t see spending $14.99 for the CD and would rather just either download the 1 song or purchase it for .99 cents from iTunes or Amazon MP3 services? With advents of Video-OnDemand through Amazon and more notably Netflix Instant Play, people are renting less, buying even less, and choosing to watch what’s available or just renting it through Netflix through one low cost monthly subscription fee. The convergence of all of these events has lead to the recession within the entertainment industry–not because people are downloading more.

Furthermore, I submit that if the RIAA and the entertainment world believes that their content or IP is worth 1.5 trillion dollars, do they realize that the total cost of both the Iraq and Afghan wars is just over 1 trillion dollars? The economies of scale just don’t seem to add up here.

What we need here is a bit of common sense. What the RIAA should be doing is to support on-demand or more streaming content to support the direction of viewing/listening habits of the people they are serving their content to. People don’t want to spend money for an album that has 15 tracks of nonsense and 1-2 tracks that are really worth while to them. People are more likely to pay one yearly subscription cost to a service like Pandora and get unlimited music play than to pay to own hundreds or thousands of CD’s, or even hold that many MP3′s on a drive somewhere–guess what storing all that music is getting costly too and why go through that hassle? Services like Lala, Last.fm, Grooveshark, Pandora, and Spotify, many of which are available on popular mobile platforms like your Blackberry, iPhone, and Androids, the evolution of music and content viewing is changing before our very eyes. The old institutions that the RIAA holds on to are starting to or have already begun to wane, and they in addition to the rest of the industry needs to accept the fact that their losses are just that. Changes to the way people use services will have a direct impact to how much revenue they will receive. And year over year, they cannot continue to expect large growth numbers when more and more people are moving away from the “I own that” model for Music and Movies.

Additionally we need to look at improving our legal system to evolve as rapidly as our behaviors. Certainly when these laws were drawn up, these types of damages made sense given the types of cases that they would expect to deal with. Now, perhaps not so much anymore. And let’s not completely absolve the downloader’s from this. Just as the industry needs to change, with the availability of legitimate low-cost content, illegal downloading just doesn’t make sense anymore. If you are completely at a loss if you are unable to see the full series of Lost and what’s on Netflix instant play or Hulu is not enough, pony up the dollars and purchase the DVD set or buy it used from eBay or Craigslist. If you don’t want to spend that amount, clearly the need to watch this series is not as strong as you thought it was. If it is, then you see the value in both the content as well as supporting the providers of that content, and all the power to you.

We all are both victims of these types of lawsuits for profit, but also are all contributors to that same issue. When we try and remove ourselves from the problem we ignore our part in societies acceptance of these types of illegal download practices. We all should help each other promote legitimate sources of content and recognize that illegal downloading is harmful–maybe not to you today, but when someone faces these types of lawsuits (I take case against Jammie Thomas-Rasset and the ruling that $2 million dollars is justified compensation for downloading 24 songs) we all lose–the only ones that win are the plaintiff’s, in this case the RIAA.

A funny video on the heels of Steve Job’s comment that if you want Porn Android has an app for that. Thanks Android Central.